Let Me Tell You My Life

It is a genre that has been around as long as writing itself, but now it has a name. Life writing—which can encompass diaries, journals, personal papers, memoirs and full-blown autobiographies—has become, in recent years, increasingly interesting to both the reading public and to academics who study literature. And because of its focus on stories that are supposed to be “true,” it plays very compellingly into the postmodern confusions of contemporary culture, where reality TV turns out to be thoroughly stage-managed and a “memoir” like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces can garner huge headlines when it is discovered to be more fiction than fact.

One academic Canadian publishing house, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, has singled out life writing as worthy of study, and since its inception in 1992, WLUP’s Life Writing Series has published 27 books, including the surprise top seller Incorrigible, by Velma Demerson. Most of these books are by...